I have been running several different virtualisation servers, (ESXi, XenServer, Proxmox/KVM) in the past. I am now in a position where I need to set up a new virtualisation environment that is supposed to be long running. I figured it might be a good idea to be prepared for Docker as it comes up quite often lately. I have used vagrant in development environments very successfully, but not yet docker containers but will possibly start soon.
My question is, which would be the best virtualization platform to allow me to include docker at a later point? I would love to stay with something built around Xen (preferably not the Citrix flavor) but anything else would be ok as well. Guest machines will most likely only be Linux with perhaps an occasional *BSD. I cannot set up two systems, so the docker containers will have to live on the same hardware as the virtual machines. (For the single machine reason I would also like to avoid OpenStack, unless it would be the ideal match for docker + VMs).
Any advice what virtualization infrastructure is going to play nice with docker?
Docker can run on any hypervisor, AFAIK. I'm running Docker on an Ubuntu VM running on my XenServers at home. I also have an Ubuntu VM on my laptop running Docker within Virtualbox. Also, if you're interested in Docker, I would look at CoreOS, which offers Docker features in a clustered form.
As far as choosing a hypervisor to work with, pick the one your most comfortable with, fits the budget, and offers the features you need.
Also, if this is for strict dev purposes, I believe Digital Ocean offers a Docker image.
More than hypervisors, I would focus instead on systems that can play nice with VMs and containers, and manage clusters of any combination of them, like Mesos or OpenStack. Or in ways to orchestrate containers (kubernetes, CoreOS, OpenShift and others are example tools in that direction) in VMs and bare metal servers.
As long as the hypervisor can run native, unmodified Linux kernel in 64bit mode, should work. Docker have no problem running on Xen, KVM, VMWare and others, and in fact, works in most major cloud providers using those hypervisors.
I fear this will be closed as a shopping question, as they tend to get outdated and attract plethora of spammers. That being said - there must be some kind of Docker-specific community out there that you can ask?
I’ll have a look, thanks for the suggestion. However, I did not intend this as a shopping questions but more of a technology question as I am not sure how Docker would integrate (if at all) with a Hypervisor.